jhardernet

Months ago I registered an account. Yesterday, I finally filled in my profile. My friend coined a new acronym after accepting my networking request, WTYASNS: Welcome to yet another social networking site. And although I agree that my tolerance for social networking is nearing critical mass, LinkedIn is really, really sweet.

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s basically a social network for professionals.  Rather than getting sent surveys from everyone you’ve known since elementary school (which Facebook seems to have become), LinkedIn takes a more sober approach. You can connect with current and past colleagues, find people in your area for professional networking, search for jobs, and it goes on.

Why am I so excited? Because this is how I prefer to network. Meet-up groups are fine if you know someone who will be there, or are very outgoing. But a lot of times it’s just a group of people looking for drinking buddies. LinkedIn lets me target exactly the kind of skills and experiences that I would like to draw upon.

In my first 24 hours on the site, I’ve made eleven 1st degree connections, 500+ secondary connections, and received an invitation to discuss possible design improvements for one of my connection’s websites. As someone whose career may eventually go the freelance route this is an invaluable tool of involvement.

Here’shoping it pays off.

Oh, and if you’d like to join my network just visit my profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyharder

After spending more hours than I care to admit writing CSS overrides for IE 8 it seems safe to declare: Miscrosoft has lost another battle in the browser war.   Sure, IE8 is slightly more standards compliant than its predecessor, but it still requires tweaks and hacks to make everything look and work correctly. Further inconsistencies are created depending on the security settings of the user. For instance, a “High” setting blocks some dynamic HTML effects but does not alert the user, thus leading to some “broken” looking websites.

Microsoft has built in a “compatability view” button which basically re-renders the page through an IE7 emulator and makes use of the CSS overrides you had to put in place for IE7… That’s right, Microsoft has hacked IE to go back in time to be hacked by your previous hacks – it’s a METAHACK. I know, it’s confusing. And annoying.

Plus as it stands right now only about 14% of IE users are on the latest version, the rest are on IE 7 or even IE 6. It’s time Microsoft belly up to the Internet standards bar for real, and stop releasing half-hearted efforts in the meantime that will become legacy headaches for programmers.

Last week I met with the folks at Progress Michigan re: an internship opportunity. They’re a non-profit whose mission, as the name suggests, is to push an agenda of progressive political/policy goals in Michigan.  Causes include things like environmental policy, health care reform, anti-smoking legislation, etc.  Their tactics usually involve press releases, online petitions/email alerts to their mailing list, sometimes event planning, and they often team up with other similar groups. 

I first heard of the group at an Ingham County Young Dems meeting where their executive director was a guest speaker. He discussed the various types of media campaigns they’ve run and my ears perked up when he started talking about content management systems and the use of New Media to coordinate and advance public opinion.  Politics is a logical setting for rhetoric (in the good way) and technology to cohabitate – especially as traditional media sources fade quickly into irrelevancy. Anyway, I thought this sounded like an interesting group using innovative, still-developing modes of communication and I wanted to get involved… non-profits are always looking for competent and cheap help so it wasn’t too hard to gain an interview.

After talking over why I was interested in PM, and what their current objectives include we moved on to discussing how I can help in a way that would be mutually beneficial to both of us. Obviously I’m not looking for an internship where filing or copying is in the job description. I’ve done that in the past.  They were quite interested in the possibility of a usability study geared around their website.  PM is just gearing up for a full site redesign so getting feedback from their audience would be especially useful at this moment.

I explained how such a study would not only address low level concerns of the site but can also reveal general perceptions of the organization itself.  It’s an exciting study to consider. For example, PM wants their audience to not only complete the click-thru action being promoted online, but help spread their broader message… how do you measure future actions once the audience leaves the website?  How can you measure whether an audience finds the information published by PM to be timely and credible?  

The thing that makes an usability test for this type of organization tricky is the unseen (perhaps even unarticulated or unconscious) goals that take place.   It’s a huge difference from, say, e-commerce design where you can usually boil everything down to one thing: Does it make more money?  Here you’re talking about questions that revolve around nebulous concepts like community building and social change. Another reason why e-commerce design is easier is because people are more familiar with it as a genre.  If you’ve bought something online from Amazon, you can probably figure out how to order from just about any other online retailer. It’s a very well defined genre.  Design of political action tools? Not so much.  The Obama presidential campaign has a huge and sudden influence, both in how digital communication efforts are conducted as well as how they look.  They did a lot of things right but I don’t know that their visual style should be the standard for everyone.

The next step is to write up a proposal of what I want to do and explain what I think will be beneficial to PM.  Should be interesting.

The newest edition of A List Apart is online and there’s an interesting article by Patrick Lynch about visual design and usability.

Lynch points out that although eye-tracking studies seem to show that aesthetic graphics (as opposed to information graphics) are irrelevant, that is not necessarily the case.  The brain processes these images and uses them to make inferences about an interface’s personality and usability almost instantaneously, imperceptible by the eye-tracking studies. Aesthetics graphics matter in forming a gut reaction.

It’s that visceral reaction that I’m hoping to improve with the recently launched homepage test.

So. This is it. My new website, complete with portfolio, resume and blog.  But why? What is the raison d’etre?  Potential future employers is one audience; friends and strangers who have a reason to Google my name another.  And, if I write this blog correctly, then I may have a wider appeal to designers/researchers in general.  This entry will get the ball rolling, but in future entries I hope to reflect on triumphs and tribulations I encounter in my work.

In particular, I’m interested in figuring out how user research can influence (Web/software/UI/etc) design decisions.  How can we get the best information from users? How do we know what even is the best information? This involves drawing distinctions between things like user-centered design, and participatory design. Sometime these terms are used interchangeably, however they are different.  User-centered is a more generic term applicable to any situation where user data is involved while Participatory design means that at some point users and designers are actually in the same room working together.  Different situations call for different methodologies, but I tend to favor some face time at some point in a design process.

So that’s it for now. The ball is rolling and I’ve greeted the world.  I’ll be back in the next post hopefully discussing more specific issues.